Where we grow up, where we live today, and where we’ve lived over the years can all influence our perception of self, others, and the world.
Our sense of possibility, fairness, and threats can be informed by our experiences as children: what seems likely and unlikely, okay and not okay, dangerous and safe are molded by things like crime statistics, area school success ratings, healthcare quality, and real estate districting in our neighborhoods and the surrounding area.
Our sense of our own capacity can be shaped by our parents, teachers, mentors, and other authority figures and peers, who themselves are shaped—in who they are, how secure they feel, and what they choose to teach and share—by their environments; their homes.
Our sense of how the world works is derived from our understanding of the interconnected systems that frame our finite existences.
The grocery stores we visit, the products on the shelves, the jobs available, the taxes paid (or not paid), the quality of the objects we own (or don't own, but see on TV, in movies, and on social media), the relationship we have with money and the relationship important people in our lives have with money all contribute to our simplistic, but ever-growing, ever-complexifying understanding of what connects to what, which variables trigger which outcomes, and how one makes something happen—or avoids having something happen.
Some homes are single-family houses with an acre or more of land surrounding them.
Some homes are apartments—large or small, with thick or thin walls, with friendly or rude neighbors—or townhouses or condos.
Some homes have shared amenities, street or alley or assigned parking, others have loads of private, isolated, gated or fenced or tree-lined room to roam.
Some homes are surrounded by cheek-to-jowl public transit and parks and tiny bodegas to serve local convenience needs, while others are spread out, connected only by automobile—neighborhoods lacking sidewalks and connected to commercial infrastructure only by roads and highways, in contrast to those where walking, cycling, and subway-ing to everything is the norm, the local infrastructure dramatically different to account for the population density.
Research has shown that a child’s outcomes—their grades, their employment, their level of monetary success, but also overall happiness and lifestyle satisfaction—are tied to where and how they grow up.
The numbers are statistical, and outcomes will vary from person to person, but the connection between these at-home, at-school, at-work variables and how a person perceives their place in the world are fairly straightforward, if not always immediately evident, and if not at all equitably distributed.
Our specific courses through life are shaped by raw, dumb luck and happenstance, as much as the political situations in our home towns, the nature of our neighborhoods, the government and commercial and communal resources invested in the places we spend our time, and how we—as individuals—respond to all of these environmental, social, and infrastructural variables.
Homes change over time, and so do we.
But many of our opinions, beliefs, and core understandings arise when we’re younger: from our toddler years through our mid-20s.
So although we’re capable of being reshaped as our homes change—as the places in which we live, exist, grow, learn, and develop, and all their accompanying variables change—the places we called home as children and young adults sculpt the majority of our base-level beliefs and functionality.
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